The wide world of mobile payments offers an interesting puzzle for card issuers and networks–wide adoption by consumers could either buttress or fatally wound the main stage players in the credit card world that m-pay hopes to disrupt.
Sensing the evolve for die position his company finds itself in, Visa Charlie Scharf has chose to change.
“We have to think and act much more like a technology company than we have before,” Scharf says a few weeks later at a restaurant in Sag Harbor, New York, where he’s on vacation with his family. “The payments world is changing. There are new entrants, new opportunities for people to get into our business and other opportunities for us to grow our business in ways that didn’t exist before.”
Can such a jump be made? Analysts aren’t so sure, reports Bloomberg.
“Visa and MasterCard are holding on for dear life,” says Josh Siegel, CEO of StoneCastle Partners LLC in New York, which invests in financial firms. Scharf “has to figure out how to take this cash cow — which does have massive market power — and either stifle or acquire technology to maintain the status quo or become that renegade and totally overhaul the company.”
